Via: Tuned In
Season 1 of Justified began with marshal Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) coming back home to Harlan County, Ky., from Miami. He took some detours early on–to L.A. in one episode–but the show hit a new level in season 2, in which Givens investigated the marijuana-dealing Bennett clan, whose history was knottily entangled with his own and his family’s. Season three brought in a criminal element from Detroit, but again came back to Harlan, fleshing out the African American community of Noble’s Holler and returning to Raylan’s long feud with his criminal father, Arlo. As much as Justified has richly expanded over three seasons, in other words, its great theme has always been returning to where you came from. So it’s intriguing and promising that season four (beginning tonight on FX) kicks off with another detour–this time into the past–that connects to Harlan County here and now. I won’t spoil the opening flashback scene, which has a reveal that deftly displays Justified’s gift for humor and surprise. But suffice it to say that it reveals a thirty-year-old crime that, by the end of the first hour, Raylan has connected to Arlo, now moldering in a jail cell after killing a cop he believed to be his own son. The first two episodes of this season take their time revealing what this old score of Arlo’s is all about, but it seems plain where it’s leading: to Raylan, who would like nothing better than never to have to think of his father again, needing to closely investigate the old man’s doings. One of the things that fascinates about Raylan is that he’s on some level a hothead, a man who’s drawn to looking for trouble, but who also fights against that tendency, straining to defuse conflicts, emotional and physical. (To that last point: it’s interesting, as many cable dramas get more and more bloody, that this gunslinger drama finds so many creative ways for Raylan to avoid shooting people to death.) Being unable to escape the past is a recurrent theme that
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: January 8th, 2013
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